


Three and Four

by Olivia_Ivy



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Android Peter AU, It happens, Not Happy, identity crisis, kinda angst, this is an au of the au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-21
Updated: 2018-09-21
Packaged: 2019-07-14 23:34:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16050881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Olivia_Ivy/pseuds/Olivia_Ivy
Summary: Peter was Number Five. Only now did he wonder about and meet Numbers Three and Four.This is for the lovely mod offriendly-neighborhood-androidgo check out their blog and give them some love for this AU!





	Three and Four

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Footloose_Poets](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Footloose_Poets/gifts).



> Okay, so someone asked about Peter meeting previous incarnations of himself, namely Andrew Garfield and Tobey McGuire and what his reactions would be, and I decided to go the angstier route with it.

Tony sometimes called Peter “Number Five”. He also calls him “Kid,” and “Spiderman,” and “Buddy,” and approximately twelve other nicknames, a list that continually grows. It’s something Tony does that makes Peter smile. He’s researched it before and knew that it was a common occurrence in close and affectionate relationships, like the one Peter liked to think he and Tony had. Number Five, he gathered from the Avengers, was not a common nickname. It was easy to infer why Tony used it - though never explicitly told, Peter was Mark V of Tony’s experiments with androids.

Peter didn’t ask about the others. It didn’t really register to him to wonder about who came before him. He assumed that maybe Tony considered Ultron as Mark I, and Vision as Mark II, but Peter didn’t hear anything about Three or Four. He didn’t even think about them until the day he found them.

The whole team was fighting aliens that invaded New York. They weren’t much of a threat, but Thor said they were just the scouts for a war-hungry race who were testing Earth’s defenses, and the whole team went to send a message. Unfortunately, despite the easy fight, people were still injured. Tony had been stabbed by one of the aliens’ spears and needed surgery to fix it. Bruce insisted over and over that Tony was going to be fine, but Peter still had trouble containing his sad whine. He lowered his volume, knowing that his sad sound stresses Tony out, which was the last thing he needed with an open stab wound.

“Peter!” Tony gasped, and Peter rushed to Tony’s side. Bruce was trying to put the anesthesia mask over Tony’s face, but he kept pushing it aside. Tony grabbed Peter’s hand. “Diagnostic report.”

Peter frowned, wishing Tony would put his well-being ahead for once. Peter was backed up in at least fifty servers and there were enough spare parts in the workshop to make five more of him. Tony was, in his words, “a squishy meat-bag”, but that didn’t seem to matter to him. “My fan is broken,” Peter said, “but I can survive on the coolant alone for about 72 hours. My right calf is dented, but I can still walk.” Despite Peter’s assurances, Tony still looked worried. He tried to stand up from the gurney and Peter and Bruce had to hold him down.

“Peter, get a replacement fan from the lab,” Tony said, straining against the hands holding him down. “I’ll fix-”

“You’re not going anywhere until you’re not bleeding,” Bruce said, his tone leaving no room for argument.

“I need to fix Peter!” Tony protested.

“Dad,” Peter said softly, instantly drawing Tony’s attention to him. “I’ll be okay. I’ll get the fan and wait in the lab. FRIDAY can keep the room cool,” he assured Tony.

“Your-”

“I’ll sit down so I’m off my leg,” Peter said. Tony seemed to calm at that and laid down on the gurney. Peter held his hand until the anesthesia kicked in. 

He looked up at Bruce who was wheeling Tony away. “He’s gonna be okay, right?”

Bruce smiled. “He’ll be fine. I just need to close the wound and give him a transfusion. Should only take a couple hours.”

Peter nodded, trying to calculate what Bruce considered to be “a couple hours” vs what Peter would call that same amount of time. He limped to the lab.

Peter looked through the section of the lab Tony used to store his spare parts, but despite seeing a fan listed on the inventory, there wasn’t one in the designated spot. Though, to be fair, there were tubes in the wire bin, processors in the tube bin, and a whole right arm in the processor bin. Peter set a reminder to organize the storage area on the weekend.

“FRIDAY,” Peter asked, “where’s the fan unit?”

“There is one in the third closet, second shelf, row five.”

“Thank you,” Peter said automatically and went to the closet. Tony said it was where he put things he didn’t want to throw away but couldn’t repair. Sometimes he would go in there and come back with scraps. 

Peter located the fan exactly where FRIDAY said he would and he turned to take it back to the main part of the lab. Unfortunately, he didn’t fully account for his damaged leg and it bumped into something solid under a large white cloth. He wouldn’t have noticed it, except that the mass began making noise. Peter paused and looked at it.

There were two humps under the fabric side by side. Appendages lay straight out on the floor, including what Peter bumped into, completely covered by the fabric. When Peter jostled it, it made a soft electric whir. Peter’s danger receptors (what Tony jokingly called his “spidey sense”) began going off, but despite Peter’s better judgment, he grabbed the fabric and pulled it off.

If Peter needed to breathe, he would have gasped.

Sitting against the wall were two bodies. Peter quickly recognized that they weren’t human bodies based on the exposed sections of metal on each of them, but that wasn’t was scared him. The two bodies looked like him. Both had glassy brown eyes, both had light brown hair, though the one on the right had much more. The one on the left had a rounder face and the right one’s face was longer and more square. The left one looked older, both in features and in the technology he was made from. There were more solid segments making up the body. It looked more like early marks of the Iron Man suit than Peter’s body which was designed for fluid movement. The one on the right’s body looked like a cross between Peter’s body and the one on the left. The left’s face had clear lines in the synthetic skin, giving him an almost marionette-esque look.

Peter stood motionless for a long moment. The electric whirring, which seemed to be coming from the one on the right, continued and eventually petered out. The silence spurred him to action.

“FRIDAY,” Peter said, “activate Privacy Protocol 32, and alert me when Tony comes out of surgery.”

FRIDAY agreed, and once Peter knew for sure the cameras wouldn’t store any further recordings, he got to work. He ran a diagnostic scan on the two other androids and grabbed wires and tools from various shelves. The one on the left needed a power source and the one on the right was coming up with inexplicable errors. Peter twisted wires together and opened the left one’s chest plate. The power source was easy to fix, and maybe one could help Peter fix the other. Peter attached clamps to either end of the wire and clamped one end to his arc reactor and the other end to the cavity where an arc reactor would go if the other android had one. Peter shut down non-essential processes to compensate for sharing his power.

It took only a minute for the one on the left to boot up. He twitched his fingers, tested his arms, then finally rolled his head and faced Peter.

“Why did you activate me?” he asked. Something seemed to be wrong with his voice modulator, it sounded more electronic than Peter’s. Peter watched his eyes move around Peter’s form, almost as if he couldn’t see correctly. 

“What are you?” Peter asked instead. The other android played what sounded like an audio clip of Tony’s sarcastic laugh and Peter jerked backward, careful of the wire connecting the two of them.

“I’m you,” he said and frowned. “Or ... you’re me. You’re the new me, I guess.”

“What?” Peter asked softly.

“I’m Peter, Number Three, Mark III, Spiderman,” he ranted. “But I like Tobey.”

The android (Tobey Peter? Number Three?) jerked his arm up, moving very stiffly, and smacked the one on the right three times. On the third strike, the electric whirring began again, louder, and the android on the right activated. His eyes darted around the closet frantically, looking scared. His face crumpled and pained noises came out of his open mouth. High pitched keening that caused feedback in Peter’s audio receptors and what sounded like wheezing. His hands formed into fists and he pressed them against his eyes. Tobey reached over, grappling blindly with his eyes fixed to the ceiling, taking one of the other android’s hands in his. “Andrew, Andrew, calm down,” Tobey said soothingly. “It’s alright.”

“It’s not alright!” he (Andrew?) wailed. He sucked inward through his mouth, his chest plates shifting, giving the appearance of it expanding and contracting with the panicked intakes of breath. “It’s not alright!” he yelled again, now hitting his head. “He replaced me! He replaced me and he forgot about me and- and-” Andrew’s eyes went wide and his chest froze. The air trapped inside him whistled slightly as it escaped him, and he powered off. His head lolled forward, his chin banging against his chest and his eyes glazing over.

Tobey pulled his hand back and faced Peter. “That was Andrew. Tony called him Peter. Or, Number Four. When Tony decided I was unfixable, he made him. He tried to hide it,” he said, sounding more disappointed than bitter. “Tony wanted him to be more human. He experimented with air-powered fans to back up the arc reactor. He needed to breathe. He made him more receptive to emotional stimuli.” Tony’s sarcastic laugh played again. “That backfired.”

“What do you mean?” Peter whispered.

“Tony brought him on a mission. They took care of the threat easily enough, but a civilian woman was standing on an unstable structure. She fell. Andrew caught her too late. Her spinal cord was severed. She died instantly,” Tobey’s tone was flat, clinical. He listed the facts as if it were the weather. “Andrew didn’t take it well. Complete overload. If he thinks about it, or any other emotionally distressing subject for too long, he shuts himself down. Tony couldn’t fix him. I don’t think Andrew wants to be fixed.”

“Why do you call him that?” Peter wondered. He sat across from Tobey, moving carefully, wary of his leg and the wire linking them.

Tobey smiled sardonically. “He liked watching  _Toy Story_  with Tony. Andy is short for Andrew. When Tony stuck him back here, he didn’t want to be Peter anymore. He chose Andrew. Me, on the other hand, I didn’t want to be Peter knowing that he was going to make a new one. Tobey sounds like Tony, that was good enough for me.”

Peter digested the information silently as Tobey continued. “I got a virus. It went undetected for a while, wiping out back-ups and subtly altering my code.” Tobey’s brow furrowed and he frowned. “It’s dark. Really dark. I went too far apprehending a suspect. I hurt someone ... Pepper? No ... but she looked like Pepper ... maybe ... it’s all so dark.” He shook his head slowly. “By the time Tony found it, it had irreparably damaged my code. I can only function at a max five-percent power. Even this,” he gestured to the wire, “is pushing it. Tony didn’t want to kill either of us, so he stuck us back here and forgot about us.”

Peter shook his head. “No, no Dad wouldn’t do that,” he denied. “He would have found a way, I know he would.” His protests sounded weak even to him, and though everything Tobey was saying made logical sense, Peter refused to consider it.

“You call him Dad?” Tobey asked. An unreadable expression passed over his face. “He calls you Peter. You’re named after the two failures before you. And if you fail, the next one will be named after you, and the next one after that, and the next one after that. How many Peters do you think he’ll make, _Number Five_?”

“That’s not my name,” Peter defended.

“Then what is?” With that, Tobey grabbed the wire and unclamped it from his chest cavity. Once the power was disconnected, Tobey’s hand and head dropped, like a puppet with its strings cut.

Peter sat there, staring at the lifeless forms of Tobey and Andrew, Number Three and Number Four, Peter and Peter. He didn’t pay attention to how long he’d been sitting there until FRIDAY announced that Tony was out of surgery and would be waking up shortly. Mechanically, Peter covered the two older models up with the sheet and left the closet.

Peter sat on the workbench staring at a reflective piece of metal across from him. He tilted his head left and right, turned it, pulled at the synthetic skin covering his framework. He moved his hair around, pushing it back, letting it drop in front of his face. He searched the Web and brought up a list of male names. He frowned at his reflection. He picked a name and rolled it around in his mouth before muttering, “Tom ...”

**Author's Note:**

> Thoughts? [Support my coffee addiction through college?](https://ko-fi.com/oliviaivy)


End file.
